Formyl Peptide Receptor as a Novel Therapeutic Target for Anxiety-Related Disorders

Formyl peptide receptors (FPR) belong to a family of sensors of the immune system that detect microbe-associated molecules and inform various cellular and sensorial mechanisms to the presence of pathogens in the host. Here we demonstrate that Fpr2/3-deficient mice show a distinct profile of behaviour characterised by reduced anxiety in the marble burying and light-dark box paradigms, increased exploratory behaviour in an open-field, together with superior performance on a novel object recognition test. Pharmacological blockade with a formyl peptide receptor antagonist, Boc2, in wild type mice reproduced most of the behavioural changes observed in the Fpr2/3(-/-) mice, including a significant improvement in novel object discrimination and reduced anxiety in a light/dark shuttle test. These effects were associated with reduced FPR signalling in the gut as shown by the significant reduction in the levels of p-p38. Collectively, these findings suggest that homeostatic FPR signalling exerts a modulatory effect on anxiety-like behaviours. These findings thus suggest that therapies targeting FPRs may be a novel approach to ameliorate behavioural abnormalities present in neuropsychiatric disorders at the cognitive-emotional interface

On generalized Littlewood–Paley functions

We study the Lp boundedness of certain classes of generalized Littlewood–Paley functions S(f). We obtain Lp estimates of S(f) with sharp range of p and under optimal conditions on ?. By using these estimates along with an extrapolation argument we obtain some new and improved results on generalized Littlewood–Paley functions. The approach in proving our results is mainly based on proving vector-valued inequalities and in turn the proof of our results (in the case ?= 2) provides us with alternative proofs of the results obtained by Duoandikoetxea as his approach is based on proving certain weighted norm inequalities